To-Do List: Santorum Endorses; Maurice Sendak Dies

To know: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to form a coalition government with the centrist Kadima Party, thereby avoiding elections that were to be held this fall … Rick Santorum endorsed Mitt Romney … The children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has died; he was eighty-three … Voters in North Carolina are expected to pass an amendment to their state’s constitution today that would ban same-sex marriage.

To read: The Los Angeles Times’ Richard Winton reports from the trial of two police officers charged in the death of a homeless man:

On the ground and screaming that he was “sorry,” a shirtless Kelly Thomas is shown being hit again and again with fists, a baton and finally the butt of a stun gun by Fullerton police officers in a dramatic video that was shown for the first time Monday in an Orange County courtroom.

The grainy black and white video of Thomas’ violent encounter with police outside a bus depot is the centerpiece of the prosecutions’ case against two officers accused of escalating a standard police encounter with a homeless man into a fatal beating.

At one point, Thomas—a 37-year-old mentally ill homeless man who was a familiar face in the city’s downtown—screams out: “Dad, they are killing me!”

For the New York Times, David Jolly and Andrea Zarate write about the mysterious deaths of marine animals in Peru:

Late last year, fishermen began finding dead dolphins, hundreds of them, washed up on Peru’s northern coast. Now, seabirds have begun dying, too, and the government has yet to conclusively pinpoint a cause.

Officials insist that the two die-offs are unrelated. The dolphins are succumbing to a virus, they suggest, and the seabirds are dying of starvation because anchovies are in short supply.

But even three months after officials began testing the dolphins, the government has not released definitive results, and there is growing suspicion among the public and scientists that there might be more to the story. Some argue that offshore oil exploration could be disturbing wildlife, for example, and others fear that biotoxins or pesticides might be working their way up the food chain.

At least 877 dolphins and more than 1,500 birds, most of them brown pelicans and boobies, have died since the government began tracking the deaths in February, the Environment Ministry said last week. The dolphins, many of which appeared to have decomposed in the ocean before washing ashore, were found in the Piura and Lambayeque regions, not far from the border with Ecuador.

To watch: A report on the disappearing street photographers of Kabul:

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.